Nora Ephron

“It was personal to me." ~Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) in You've Got Mail”

“The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.Enough about that.The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.And now it's not.”

“The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.”

“Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”

“My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.”

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”

“I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.”

“He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn't give a rat's ass about him and never had.”

“When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father, and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was his father and he said it was Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister.”

“I know," I said, "but it scares me. It reminds me of my father."I'm not your father," said Mark. "Repeat after me, 'Mark Feldman is not my father.'"Mark Feldman is not my father," I said.Am I fat?" said Mark.No," I said.Am I bald?"No."Do I smell of Dr. Scholl's foot pads?"No," I said.I rest my case," said Mark.”

“[I] had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don't bump into vinaigrettes that good.)”

“You only have a certain amount of energy, and when you spread it around, everything gets confused, and the first thing you know, you can't remember which one you've told which story to, and the next thing you know, you're moaning "Oh, Morty, Morty, Morty," when what you mean is "Oh, Sidney, Sidney, Sidney," and the next thing you know, you think you're in love with both of them simply because you've been raised to believe that the only polite response to "I love you" is "I love you too," and the next thing you know, you think you're in love with only one of them, because you're too guilty to handle loving them both.”

“She's talking about condominiums," my friend Betty Searle called up to say one day. "Obviously she's involved with someone."Are you sure?" I said.Of course I'm sure," said Betty. "The question is who." She thought for a minute. "Maybe it's Senator Campbell," she said. "He's talking condominiums, too."Senators always talk about condominiums," I said. That's true," said Betty.”

“There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.”

“Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.”

“... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful bookis one of the main reasons I read;but it doesn't happen every timeor even every other time,and when it does happen,I am truly beside myself.”

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”

“In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. ”

“I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.”

“I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regrettedmost of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.”